Boynton Beach · Palm Beach County

Boynton Beach Wrongful Death Lawyer

A family loses somebody and is then handed a funeral to arrange, an income that has stopped, and a company that already has lawyers on it. We can take it from here. Call 833-370-8692 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Boynton Beach personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Palm Beach County since 1993.

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$3,500,000 Jury verdict, funeral home negligence.

§ 768.21 Sets who may recover and what each survivor may claim.

Palm Beach County Our Boynton Beach office takes these claims anywhere in the county.

In Palm Beach County

Wrongful Death claims in Boynton Beach

The other side had counsel within days, and you are being asked for paperwork while you are still arranging a service. Meanwhile the mortgage is due, the income has stopped, and nobody has given you a straight account of what actually happened. Getting that account, and providing for the people left behind, is what we do from the first call.

A wrongful death claim arising in Boynton Beach is brought in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, generally at the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach, by the personal representative of the estate. That appointment is a probate step that has to come first, and it takes time families rarely anticipate.

Short answer

A Boynton Beach wrongful death claim is brought by the personal representative of the estate, and Florida decides by statute which survivors may recover and for what. The general deadline is two years from the death. The estate has to be opened before a claim can be filed, which is why that step is usually started first.

What to do after a wrongful death in Boynton Beach

Nothing has to be decided this week. The deadline is measured in years and almost nothing is lost by taking two weeks. What is worth doing early is keeping paper: the hospital records, the police report number, the bills as they arrive, and a note of who has called and what they said. Families frequently call us because somebody asked them to sign something and it did not feel right, and that instinct is usually correct.
Do not sign a release, and be careful about a recorded statement. An insurer may make an early offer, sometimes a considerate one, and it will come with a release. A release cannot be reopened. Nobody should sign one before there is a clear picture of what happened and who is responsible, and a family is not required to be recorded by the other side while they are arranging a funeral.
Ask what became of the vehicle, the equipment or the scene. Whatever was involved may be repaired, released or scrapped within weeks, and once it is gone it cannot be examined. A short written request that it be preserved is often all that is needed, and it can be sent long before anybody decides whether to bring a claim.
An estate has to be opened before anything can be filed. Florida requires the claim to be brought by a personal representative of the estate rather than by the family directly, under Fla. Stat. § 768.20. It is a probate step, it takes time, and it is the one thing worth starting early even where the family has not decided anything else.
Ask before you agree to an autopsy decision either way. In some deaths the medical examiner decides and the family has no say. In others there is a choice, and it is made in the first day or two while nobody is thinking about evidence. Where the cause of death may be disputed later, that decision is difficult to revisit.

Where these happen in Boynton Beach

Boynton sits in the part of Palm Beach County with the highest concentration of older residents and care facilities in it, and that shapes both what we are called about and what the other side argues.

Care facilities and assisted living

A large number of nursing homes, assisted living residences and memory care units serve this part of the county.
- Falls, pressure sores and untreated infections, each documented by the facility itself
- Staffing levels, which are frequently the real issue behind an individual incident
- State inspection and complaint history, something we can get from a source the facility does not control
I-95 and the Boynton Beach Boulevard interchange

The corridor carrying through traffic and freight, and the interchange where it meets local roads.
- Collisions at speed where the same impact is far more serious for an older person
- Commercial vehicles with federal records on a retention schedule
- Trauma transport, which fixes the sequence in a way an ordinary hospital record does not
Community pools and gated developments

Drownings at association pools and in private pools within the developments that make up much of the city.
- Gate, fence and alarm requirements measurable against a code
- Association responsibility for a shared pool, separate from an individual owner
- Supervision arrangements that existed on paper and not in practice
The retail and delivery corridors

Congress Avenue and the shopping centers, where pedestrians and older drivers share space with constant delivery traffic.
- Pedestrians struck in parking lots and at plaza entrances rather than at signals
- Commercial delivery vehicles carrying policies far larger than a private car
- Store and shopping center cameras, which are the best evidence and are overwritten within weeks

What causes them

Falls from height on construction sites, and objects falling onto people below
Drownings, in pools where the gate, the alarm or the supervision was not what it was supposed to be
Violence at properties where the owner already knew there was a problem and did nothing about it
Medical care that went wrong, where the family is given an account that does not match what they saw
Nursing home neglect, where a decline was documented by the people who were paid to prevent it

The injuries we see, and what each one turns on

Parents

Parents of a child who died as a minor may recover for mental pain and suffering. Parents of an adult child may recover where there are no other survivors under the Act.

Lost support and services

What the person contributed to the household, in money and in work that now has to be paid for or gone without. It is calculated from the date of the injury and forward over the years the person would reasonably have been expected to live, and it is usually the part that requires an economist.

What belongs to the estate rather than to a survivor

Medical and funeral expenses paid by the estate, and the earnings the person would have accumulated. These are separate from the survivors’ own losses and are recovered by the estate itself.

What Florida law requires you to prove

Who brings the claim

The personal representative of the estate brings it, on behalf of the survivors and the estate together, under Fla. Stat. § 768.20. A family cannot file individually. If there is a will it usually names who that should be; if there is not, the court appoints somebody, and the probate step runs alongside the injury claim rather than after it.

The deadline

A wrongful death action in Florida generally has to be filed within two years of the death under Fla. Stat. § 95.11. Claims against a government body carry a separate and much shorter notice requirement, which is why the identity of the defendant is worth settling early rather than late.

How fault is shared

Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81 a recovery is reduced by the share of fault attributed to the person who died, and a finding of more than 50 percent bars it altogether. Families are frequently told at an early stage that their relative caused it. That is an opening position rather than a conclusion, and it is answered with evidence.

The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide wrongful death page rather than being restated in every market.

How we prove it in Palm Beach County

A large share of these cases turn on records kept by the very organization that would be the defendant, so the independent sources matter more here than almost anywhere.

What we go after, and when

The incident or crash report and the officer’s notes and photographs
The medical examiner’s report and autopsy findings
Hospital, ambulance and facility care records from injury to death
State inspection and complaint history for any care facility, from the regulator rather than the facility
Staffing and rota records, which is where an individual incident becomes a pattern
Any vehicle or equipment involved, inspected before it is repaired or released
Store, association and shopping center camera footage, requested inside the first two weeks
Employment, pension and household records for the economic losses

Where a facility is involved, the useful documents are the ones it did not write: the regulator’s inspection history, the complaints filed by other families, and the staffing records it has to keep for other reasons. Those are requested first.

A setting a wrongful death claim in Boynton Beach typically arises from

Who would handle your case

Being hurt in Boynton Beach is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled wrongful death claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.

How insurance companies handle these claims

The other side is usually organized before the funeral. That is not cruelty, it is procedure, and it is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering it.

The vehicle or the equipment is released and disposed of: Once it is gone the only version of events is the one written down by somebody else. A preservation request in the first weeks is routine and costs nothing. The same request in the fourth month is an argument about what was destroyed.
The family is told to wait for the investigation to finish: A police or agency investigation can run for months and its conclusions are not binding on a civil claim in any event. Waiting for it is how evidence gets lost. The two processes run in parallel, and the civil work does not need permission from the criminal one.
The available insurance is described as small and fixed: Sometimes it genuinely is, and where a death was caused by somebody with a minimum policy that is a hard conversation to have honestly. Frequently it is not the whole picture: an employer, a vehicle owner, a property owner, a contractor or an umbrella policy can sit behind the first one. Finding out is a search rather than a question.

What a claim can include

Loss of companionship, guidance and protection

What a spouse, a child or a parent has lost that is not financial. The statute decides which survivors may claim it.

Mental pain and suffering of the survivors

The grief of the people the statute recognizes, from the date of the injury onward.

Lost accumulations of the estate

What the person would have saved and left behind had they lived a normal working life. It generally requires an economist and it is frequently the largest single figure in the claim.

What we have recovered

Verified matters this firm has handled on wrongful death claims. Figures are gross recoveries, before attorney fees, costs and medical liens come out of them.

$2 millionWrongful death, out-of-code stairwell

A father and grandfather died in a fall down a makeshift stairwell built when an owner split a townhouse into two units without permits.

Broward County jury verdict

Every verdict and settlement we publish, with the press coverage for the ones that were reported. No result predicts another case: every claim turns on its own facts, its own evidence and the insurance actually available.

Another setting a wrongful death claim in Boynton Beach arises from

Why Wolf & Pravato in Boynton Beach

A Boynton Beach wrongful death claim is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit at the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach, with the estate opened in the probate division of the same circuit, and that is the courthouse this office appears in. What an insurer offers depends in part on that venue, because carriers keep records of which firms actually try cases there.

Fewer than one percent of Florida lawyers are Board Certified in Civil Trial law: 861 of them, against a Bar membership over 109,000. Richard Pravato is one, and has been since 2004. Carriers price a claim partly on who is holding it, which is the practical reason that matters to somebody deciding who to call.

A consultation costs nothing, and neither does the case unless we recover money for you. Where we do not believe a claim is worth bringing, we will tell you plainly rather than take it on and let it drift.

Call 833-370-8692 Free consultation. No fee unless we win.

Questions

Boynton Beach wrongful death questions

The facility says our mother fell and there was nothing anyone could do. How would we ever know?

From records the facility did not write. The state regulator holds inspection findings and complaints made by other families, and staffing records have to be kept for reasons unrelated to any claim. Where a facility has a history, it usually shows up there rather than in the file it prepared about your mother.

She was elderly and already unwell. Does that reduce what a claim is worth?

It is certainly what the other side will say, and it is not the law. Florida takes a person as they are found. Age and existing conditions are relevant to what the person would have earned and how long they would have lived, and they are not a reason the loss counts for less. The statute recognizes a spouse’s and a family’s loss regardless.

Nobody in the family wants to be in charge of this. What happens then?

Somebody has to be appointed personal representative before a claim can be filed, but it does not mean running the case. It is a role with a legal duty and a fair amount of paperwork, and most of the paperwork is handled for the family. Where nobody is willing or able, the court can appoint somebody else, and that is a normal outcome rather than a problem.

We have not been appointed personal representative yet. Is it too early to call?

No, and that is precisely when the call is most useful. The appointment is a probate step that takes time, and evidence in the underlying case is aging while it happens. We can explain the sequence and begin preserving what matters without anyone committing to anything.

Who is allowed to bring a wrongful death claim in Florida?

The personal representative of the deceased person’s estate, acting on behalf of the surviving family members and the estate. Individual relatives do not each file their own suit. Fla. Stat. § 768.21 then decides which survivors may recover and what each of them may recover for.

The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.

Tell us what happened

A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 1375 E Gateway Blvd, Boynton Beach, FL 33426.

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